On The Family

When I was in India in 2003, I once enjoyed a long conversation with a rickshaw-puller over whether or not he believed his life was worth living. In the course of it, he made an amazing observation that startled me; he said that a person's beliefs, views, and dispositions can all be ultimately traced back to his/her notion of either the importance or the redundancy of the family. Here are three broad ways of viewing the family (needless to say, this is an ideal-typical picture) :

(A) The Family As The Sacred Vault : For those who hold this belief, the family provides the over-arching set of values, horizons, and meanings within which we go about the task of building our life-narratives. All our most deeply-cherished views and conceptions are imbibed from the font of the family, and it is to the family that we constantly keep on returning throughout the various crisis-stages of our life such as marriage, divorce, illness, and death. Moreover, the family acts as a shock-absorber when things go fundamentally wrong, and even if for some reason we happen to stray away from it on a particular occasion, we are always free to return to it in search of an oasis of peace in a world riven through with hatred, turmoil, and anxiety. It is therefore the great protective shield against the 'big, bad, world out there'; the last line of defence against the encroaching forces of barbarism; and the most reliable bulwark against the threat of anomie.

Men and women who accept this understanding of the family usually do so, however, for mutually opposed reasons : the men because it provides them with a powerful ideological tool to dominate the women by threating them with the dire consequences that would allegedly befall them if they moved away from this sanctified canopy, and the women because they have (already) been indoctrinated right from their childhood to accept this view of things as ingrained into the nature of reality.

(B) The Family As An Oppressive Totality : Not everyone, however, is willing to accept the notion of the family as outlined under (A), even while allowing that our fundamental values, impulses, and survival skills are picked up from the family. Just as Darwin's Nature cares not for the individual but for the Species alone, the family too, so it is argued, behaves as a sort of social Juggernaut that ruthlessly rolls on, caring only for its self-propagation into the next generation and riding roughshod over the interests of specific family-members. All social systems have more or less detailed sets of injunctions, norms and taboos, and every family mirrors these mandates within its own boundaries which it polices rigorously and whose transgressions it punishes meticulously. Most families therefore expend a lot of effort in bringing back to the fold the family drop-outs, but these reconciliatory attempts are viewed with scorn and repugnance by the latter as a form of higher paternalism.

These people claim that, historically speaking, the (proto-)human family was set up by (Neanderthal?) males who wanted to dominate their (Neanderthal?) females; now, however, through the process of 'ideological internalisation' or 'sociological indoctrination', these historic origins have become lost in the mists of the past so much so that men and women have started believing that the terms 'family' and 'civilisation' are co-terminous. It is this sinister equation between Civilisation and the Family (with the associated implication that people who have consciously rejected the family, for whatsoever reasons, have become inhuman, antisocial, juvenile, disruptive, pitiable, immature, childish, dilemma-ridden, unsophisticated, and morally degenerate, all at one stroke) that holders of this second view vehemently repudiate. Indeed, they would turn this argument on its head and claim that, in truth, it is the family that is the hotbed of domestic violence, mindless accumulativeness, punishment of little children for failing to learn their multiplication tables, brutalities on women, and proto-fascism : how much more of barbarism could you ask for?

(C) The Family As An Ironic Irrelevance : This third view is an unstable 'synthesis' of the first two delineated above. Those who espouse it claim, on the one hand, that it is indeed the case that most of our deeply-cherished values, views, beliefs, notions, linguistic skills, and so on, are acquired from within a familial context. On the other hand, they claim that it is precisely because of this reason that we must spend the rest of our lives re-examining (and throwing out, whenever necessary) whatever has been thrust into us by the family since our childhood, because most of our deeply-ingrained prejudices, fears, and anxieties are all insiduous after-effects of having been brought up by a family. It is the family, they believe, that generates into us the primordial divisive feelings of 'We' versus 'Them', and 'Us' against 'They'; and consequently, though they do not actually seek to uproot the family (for they know not what to replace it with), they yearn, with a detached resignation, for an unrealized (because unrealizable) utopia where the 'family shall wither away'.

Consequently, such people neither love nor hate the family : theirs is rather an attitude of ironic equanimity. They are happy to know that other people find warmth, security, and comfort within their families, but would prefer, unless it is absolutely necessary for purely pragmatic reasons, to keep themselves away from such familial associations. The family, therefore, is neither 'good' nor 'bad' in their evaluative vocabulary, it is simply irrelevant in their wider scheme of things, and this somewhat in the spirit of a James Joyce who, when asked what his religion was, replied : 'Not Applicable.' To this riposte, a holder of the third view shall only add that the family is equally inapplicable.